The World Had Never Seen a Crisis Like This

As one of the few international development specialists on the ground in Sierra Leone from the beginning to the end of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Sinead Walsh AB ’00 saw firsthand the devastation wrought by the deadly virus as well as the struggles of both local and international responders to contain it.

“The world had never seen a crisis like this. There had been Ebola outbreaks but not remotely approaching this scale and geographical spread,” says Walsh, who served as the Irish ambassador to Sierra Leone and Liberia and head of mission for Irish Aid from 2011 to 2016. “In the early months, I felt like we were just trying to prevent things from collapsing entirely until the cavalry arrived. But I eventually learned that the cavalry was a mirage because everyone who came was facing the same unprecedented challenge. Even the experts would admit that they were flying blind.”

Now deputy director of the Multilateral Unit within Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Dublin, Walsh recently spent time at Harvard—as a senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and a visiting scholar in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School—working on a book about her perspective on the Ebola crisis (co-authored with British doctor Oliver Johnson).

Walsh spoke with the Harvard Alumni Association about her path from Harvard College to a career in international development, her experiences in Sierra Leone, and what’s next for her.

How did you become interested in international development?

It’s really the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. As a country, Ireland is very interested in international development, especially in Africa, so I grew up in that context. For example, when I was a kid, for the 40 days of Lent, instead of spending your pocket money on sweets, you would give up sweets and put the money in what we call the Trócaire box (Trócaire is one of our main NGOs). These things were just a part of life that we took for granted.

When I was at Harvard, one of the real benefits was getting involved in organizations that were trying to raise awareness and funds for international development. I started working for Human Rights Watch the summer of junior year and continued through senior year. I received a fellowship, which enabled me to volunteer in India after graduation. These opportunities were a wonderful basis to go into my career.

After college, you spent many years working for NGOs in different parts of the world. How did that prepare you for your government work in West Africa?

Sierra Leone was my first time working in a diplomatic role, but my background in NGOs in places like Rwanda and South Sudan gave me a comfort level with Africa and the aid program side of things, and I was able to build the other skills. When you start a new job, I think it’s helpful if there’s something you can hang on to that you know, even as you’re trying to learn all the new things that you don’t know.

How did your work change when Ebola broke out in 2014?

When I first arrived in Sierra Leone, we were focused on issues like teenage pregnancy and childhood nutrition. But when Ebola started, everything got turned on its head. We stopped everything we were doing and spent all of our time and money on Ebola. After the first few months—when the world finally woke up to what was happening—we had a lot of new people coming in who had specialized expertise, but they didn’t have any local knowledge. I had been in the country for about three years and I had many contacts, so I spent a lot of time coordinating people to work together on different aspects of the crisis.

Are there particular moments that have stuck with you from your time in Sierra Leone?

There was this guy Joshua who was teaching me Krio, which is the lingua franca of Sierra Leone. He was a schoolteacher, and his wife, Jennifer, was a nurse. In Sierra Leonean terms, this was a middle-class family. In 2013, before Ebola, Jennifer got sick; it was a relatively minor ailment, but because of the poor standard of health care, even for people who could pay for it, she got the wrong treatment and deteriorated rapidly. When I went to visit her, I was shocked to find her cooped up in a place that wasn’t a hospital but almost like a hospice. This was a woman of twenty-something years of age, and it seemed very possible that she would die. Thankfully, she did improve eventually, but her situation is an example of just how weak the health system was.

This was one of the things that led to the Ebola crisis exploding. And the crisis made the health system even worse. One of the big mistakes we made as an international community was that we didn’t do enough to treat non-Ebola deaths as an emergency, which it was. Thousands died during the crisis, not from Ebola, but from other diseases that they couldn’t get treatment for because health staff were dying or fleeing, or because people didn’t go to health clinics for fear they might contract Ebola there.

Why did you decide to write a book about the crisis?

During the crisis, there was a lot of hysteria to sift through. Although most people working for NGOs and in diplomatic offices were at low risk (because Ebola can only be spread via bodily fluids, not through the air), this was being portrayed very differently in the international press. In the first few months, a lot of people around us left and a lot of organizations shut down. Nobody on my team had any interest in leaving because we didn’t believe the hype and we could see the huge need. And the more other people left, the greater the needs were. There was never a more important time to stay.

When the crisis was winding down and people started writing about it, I didn’t see my experience represented. A lot of people who were writing about Ebola had never been to the region or had only been for a short period, whereas Ebola in Sierra Leone went on for 22 months. I shared my frustrations with a doctor I had worked with in Sierra Leone, and he had the same view. We decided we couldn’t really complain and not write anything ourselves—that’s when the idea for the book came about. I jumped at the opportunity to come back to Harvard to work on it. Splitting my time between the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Harvard Medical School was ideal because I got to interact with people who had different perspectives on the crisis.

What’s next for you?

I’ll be doing a book tour for Getting to Zero: A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline—including launch events at Harvard, and in London, Dublin, and Freetown—which will hopefully be an opportunity to get the message out about what could be done differently in future crises. Other than that, I’m back at work at headquarters where I’m focused mainly on the United Nations, particularly reforms in the UN system, and sustainable development goals. That’s keeping me quite busy at the moment, but I have no doubt I will be back in Africa soon!

At this year’s Public Interested Conference the Harvard Alumni Association took a few minutes to speak with Sarah Lockridge-Steckel AB ’09. Sarah is the CEO and Founder of The Collective in Memphis, Tennessee. Read More